The Mayweather guaranteed payday is even before any of the PPV cut which is to approximate a total of $140 million if the Golden Boy prediction of 2 million PPV buys is correct. Also, Mayweather will receive a portion of the closed circuit and movie theatre showings. 500 theatres will carry the Mayweather-Canelo fight which is 5 times as many as the previous high. In a teleconference held today, Mayweather rep Leonard Ellerbee stated that almost all tickets for the closed circuit showings in Vegas are sold out. There are approximately 25,000 seats at $100 per ticket.

The gate for Canelo-Mayweather will have the largest gate in combat sports history as it will come in at $19,905,000 according to the Sports Business Daily (subscription required). SBD also indicates that sponsors will be paying rights fees of $2 million. Seven sponsors have signed up, including AT&T, Corona and Valvoline.

You know this amount makes any purse ever received by a UFC fighter seem like chump change in comparison when Dana White fishes for excuses instead of saying “fuck” on Twitter. What’s even crazier is that if the PPV meets expectations, Mayweather might not even be making enough money. After all, without him on the card, the number of buys would go from potentially 2 million to approximately 2; why should he let others make $98.5 million off his backbreaking labor while he pockets only a paltry $41.5 million?

NFL players used to get 50% of all league revenue and now use a tiered structure, so the fighters would be suckers to accept anything less than something in the $70 million range… and Mayweather is no sucker. Thus, in addition to the $41.5 million, Mayweather probably has a pretty generous amount of PPV points built into his contract, which don’t even count towards that number. It wouldn’t be unreasonable for Mayweather to demand most of that money for himself as the main draw, so he did.

The PPV is predicted by Golden Boy Promotions (a completely uninterested party) to break records; we’ll see if that happens. There are now 90 million homes with PPV capabilities, whereas there were only 61 million in 2007. If this factor helps push “no respect nothing” Mayweather into billionaire status, then I wonder what’s wrong with the UFC.